Hello community
I am a student from Vienna currently writing his master thesis about
"Fast and userfriendly information retrieval in large indices" (working
title), that focuses on techniques like faceted browsing and field
collapsing.
The funtionalities and internals of Solr cover a large part of my
theoretical work and I also want to point out that ease of integration
into existing projects and a good self declaring user interface are
important things to consider when creating a faceting browsing solution.
As a showcase for these things I am creating a reusable Javascript
Widget Library that directly queries solr using asynchronuous calls to
create a very fast, dynamic and easy to use data browser.
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I now want to introduce my (planned) work to the community and propose
the implementation, elaboration and documentation of this library as a
Google Summer of Code 2008 project. I already participated in gsoc and I
think it's a very good way for students to start contributing to an open
soure project.
I started creating a small prototype a few weeks ago, you can test it
here: http://lovo.test.dev.indoqa.com/mepheser/moobrowser/
It covers a fictional media library created by a testdata generator.
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It uses a prototype of my MooTools(http://mootools.net) based javascript
library. Mootools are chosen because of the good inheritance mechanism,
thus you can create a very "clean" widget system using baseclasses. As
mentioned before, everything is created under the paradigm "keep it simple"
Looking at the html sourcecode, you just have to create empty divs that
act as "targets" and then create an instance of Moobrowser using the
solr url:
mooBrowser = new MooBrowser('url-of-solr');
Now you can add various widgets to this browser. Each widget consists of
its javascript class and a xslt stylesheet that is used to create the
appropriate response from solr. See
http://lovo.test.dev.indoqa.com/mepheser/moobrowser/moobrowser.js for
the js source code. Currently these widgets are supported in an alpha
version:
- MooBrowserPageableResultWidget that creates the "result view"
including paging buttons
- MooBrowserSingleFieldFacetWidget for simple facet fiels. These fields
can be dependend on other fields, see "by medium" -> "image" as an example
- MooBrowserTreeFacetWidget: this is used to display hierarchical facets
(see "by category" -> "sports" -> "tennis" -> ..
The data is stored in layers like category_0, category_1 in the index.
- new MooBrowserSearchFacetWidge for full text searching
All rendering is done using css, every "target" div is self-updating and
delivers its fitting html after the user changes his selection.
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Of cource I would formulate an "official" proposal containing tasks,
timeline, etc. AFAIK, the timeline is extended till next moday.
WDYT?
Best regard,
Matthias